Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
As an ecommerce site operator, we respond to emails within an hour during business hours. I give my customers 24 hours to reply before I begin *considering* a response late.
Personally, I'm very happy if I get an email response within an hour. If I'm making a purchase online, I expect to hear back within 24 hours. Anything beyond that starts to feel late.
When buying, or inquiring, when do you expect to get an answer? When selling-how soon do you reply?
Not everyone lives on the web; 24-48 hours is usually quite quick enough; many large companies run to 72hr.
If you harass anyone within 24 hours, best not to expect repeat business ;)
From a customer viewpoint - customers will dump on you for the least provocation, even if it's not your fault. If you don't reply within 24 hours, expect to be ignored and even badmouthed unless the customer really REALLY wants something you have and only you have it. If that's the case, you don't care anyway. :-)
From a company viewpoint, assume nothing. Three examples:
One such customer did not reply to our emails. We gave her a day, re-sent it. Another day, tried to call her, she hung up on us. We called back and left a message which she ignored. We can only assume she thought we were trying to do a phone solicitation when all we were trying to do was fulfill her order. If this was her frame of mind, any further attempts would have been perceived as harassment, so we had to give up.
Another issue is some servers' email policies automatically ban your comunications for whatever reason when they are legitimate replies to customer inquires. I think we All knOw who the cuLprit is here. Sometimes they go through, sometimes they don't. Did it get spam-boxed? Is the customer igoring it, lazy, off for a weekend in Bermuda? Our only recourse is to resend the communication through a second mail account such as yahoo or gmail, explaing WHY we're sending it to them again, and after a third try, like they say, strike three, you're out.
Again, assume nothing: we had an unusually large order, followed by ANOTHER large order minutes later by the same person, and both were priority mail. These are red flags for possible CC fraud. We tried to run the card and it beeped LOUD, invalid transaction. Tried email contact three times, no response, and we'd learned our hard lesson about calling the customer. So a week later we put the items back in stock and assumed fraud.
Two weeks later, we get a call, "What happened to our orders?" It appears she had over-spent her daily allowance on her debit card. All of our emails from BOTH accounts had gone into her spam box. Fortunately she still wanted the orders.
The moral, there is no second guessing customers. From what I can tell, you have to give them every opportunity and allow them to leave you hanging, it's your choice to hang or let it go. :-)
If I donot receive a response within 48 hours, I normally call. It is rare that a customer hangs up without even listening. Of course it helps, that I take full payment in advance and he/she is committed.
:-)
We called back and left a message which she ignored.
We had her billing info. We could have just taken her money and charged it, and said tough bananas on you. Is that a way to build a reputation?
A lot depends on what you can glean from the order, from their communications in the comments. It's a tough "call" (ack, horrible pun not intended.)
That seems to provide the right response time that customers are pretty happy with. We get the odd new customer who sends a 'are you there? did you get my email?' followup ten minutes after sending the first email, but once they get to know how we work even they are fine with it.
all the best, a.
